Introduction, the Calmer 560

Amacrox was established as one of few FSP retail brands in 2003, since then it no longer sells ATX power supplies, rather different brick PSUs, chargers and other generic garbage hundreds of Chinese brands make as well. In its era, FSP was selling some interesting units under the brand, one of them was this fanless Calmer 560 (AX560-PEL1). It was in fact 400W unit with 560W “peak” rating trick. FSP even shipped it in aluminium briefcase a decade ago so you can imagine what was the target market.

The Calmer 560 was already 80 PLUS Bronze certified and even in that very certification report you can see how much weight you can put on Ecova’s testing. That unit failed on voltage regulation for two rails, but hey, it delivered efficiency, so who cares right? I got this unit for repair as it was no longer able to start, let alone work under load.

As you can see, though ATX 2.2, it already delivers most of the power on the +12V rails. This unit already has synchronous rectification for all the rails, FSP used this with their fanless Zen units long before they came up with the Aurum platform. Despite that the voltage regulation was poor as even the report above shows. So let’s take a look inside to see what the problem is.

As usually in that era (Blue Storm II / Epsilon / Everest), there are two screws connecting the secondary heatsink to the chassis to transfer heat to it, those have to go. You can also see some screws in the upper lid which this time forms a big thick heatsink by itself.

There is 8 screws from the top, two of them also mounted to the secondary heatsink. Two more are from the sides. Everything has to go so you can remove the lid and get inside.